[Clipart] Comma-separated keywords in metadata

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Okay, so then we should for now concentrate on the stuff that will
> make it easier to add metadata to images without any, probably, or on
> categorization of the images that have the required metadata but are
> unsorted.

Yes, agreed.  And particularly something suitable for adding/editing
keywords "as we go" because I figure initially we'll just set up some
broad groups, like 'animals', 'people', 'signs', etc. and then as work
collects folks can add narrower and more specific terms. 

> If there are 600+ images _with_ metadata, and _most_ people didn't
> include it, wow, that's a lot of metadataless images sitting around,
> with no author info!

Fortunately we had several artists who were very good about submitting
their work as a tarball with a README or other file with their license,
title, and author info, so it was not hard to add the metadata.  We
still have a number of images without metadata, but unfortunately we
also have no way of determining the author info.  See the PASSFAIL
report in the tarball for details.

> Should we be adding an optional author-email field to the upload
> script?  I was already thinking of having it at least provide a link
> to a page that lists known/supported optional fields, or something.
> As it stands, the user has to just _know_ what fields they can add,
> which seems wrong.  Maybe instead of the current system for optional
> fields where the user specifies the name and value for the field,
> there could be dropdown lists for the field names, or something?
> (That would be easy to implement...)

An email address or URL for the author would be really nice to have,
because then we'd have a way to contact them in case there were
questions.  However I suspect that in many cases the author would not
want their email address going out in the clipart "publically", lest it
wind up on a web page somewhere and some spambot harvests it.  So if you
do add an email address field, also be sure to include a checkbox for
them to specify whether or not the address should be included in the
metadata or not (assuming there's another place to keep the address...)

Bryce